Why would any sane person choose to suffer? The answer to this question is a primal one and of particular relevance to society in the current age: control. With chaos and uncertainty creeping from every corner of life, cycling provides us with control over physical suffering; to suffer at our own will provides us the control we viscerally crave. This control then provides us the courage to face uncertainty in life with the confidence that we can handle anything it can throw at us.
There is no challenge within Cycling which more comprehensively embodies this notion than The Hour Record, which represents the only event that pits the rider not against a course, but against Time itself; how far can the rider propel themselves in the span of sixty minutes while also suppressing their nausea as they turn left endlessly?
The cruelty is hard to grasp. As cyclists we suffer, but our suffering is normally proportional to it’s intensity – certainly it hurts to ride harder, but the harder we ride, the sooner the pain will subside. In the Hour, the duration of the suffering is uniform: the effort will last 60 minutes and no amount of increased suffering will shorten it, unless, of course, you believe Al Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which states that for a body moving at speed, time moves relatively slower than it does for a body at rest. According to Al, then, the rider will experience a marginally reduced Hour measured not by a clock moving with the rider, but by a clock sitting at rest at the side of the track. (While this amount of time is mathematically negligible, it does explain why intervals on the trainer feel comparatively more interminable than intervals on the road.)
Eddy Merckx himself made the following observation after setting the benchmark effort of 49,431 meters in 1972:
The pain was very, very, very significant. There is no comparison with a time trial. There you can change gear, change your cadence, relax even if it is only for a few instants’ respite. The Hour is a permanent, total, intense effort, which can’t be compared to anything else.1
Knowing that the Prophet’s bunkmate was The Man With the Hammer, the triple use of the word “very” is somewhat panic-inducing.
In recent years, the Hour Record has sadly seen a decline in interest, with the last attempt by world-class rider having been made by Chris Boardman in 2000. Boardman was at the center of the Hour’s Golden Era in the early Nineties which saw Graeme Obree kick off a frenzy of attempts to raise it ever higher by first breaking the record in his innovative tuck position as an amateur in 1993. Boardman broke it a few months later, before Obree reclaimed it in his even-more radical Super-Man position. This was a period where Boardman, Obree, Miguel Indurain, and Tony Rominger all traded the record for the better part of a decade, each going ever-farther in evermore innovative riding positions.
The UCI put a halt to the interest in this record by establishing two records, the (Athlete’s) Hour Record and The Best Human Effort. The Hour restricts the equipment to that of a standard double-triangle frame with drop bars, while the Best Human Effort has no such restriction. While the intent was to establish a more equal judgement of the athlete instead of the focus on equipment, it misses the point that advancement, evolution, and innovation are all basic elements of what it means to be Human, and by eliminating these elements from The Hour, they eliminated the appeal in what is our sport’s most primal effort. After all, there were few riders willing to go head to head with Merckx in his time, and so there are few who are willing to do so today.
Chris Boardman stands apart in this regard and indeed went after the new record, which he broke by a whopping 10 meters3. Over the course of his career, he set the record three times, which makes him possibly both the toughest and slowest-learning human currently living; even Merckx declared he would never attempt the Hour a second time, despite having fallen short of his personal goal of 50,000 meters. Boardman describes the Hour in simple, physiological terms: with every push of the pedals, you break down the fibers in your muscles such that for each subsequent revolution, you have a little less functional muscle mass available to sustain your current speed and power through to the end. In a word, devastation. It is not the sort of thing one attempts more than one needs to.
To gauge an effort of this type is perhaps the most pure description of The V; you ride not as hard as you know you can, but as hard as you hope you might. Boardman, on the Hour Record:
You have three questions going through your mind:
How far to go?
How hard am I trying?
Is the pace sustainable for that distance?
If the answer is “yes”, that means you’re not trying hard enough. If it’s no, it’s too late to do anything about it. You’re looking for the answer “maybe”.2
Despite all the training, preparation, and technical advancement that goes into any attempt on l’Heure, it remains a matter of the Human element, one of imprecise precision.
1,2 These quotes are taken from William Fotheringham‘s biography of Eddy Merckx, Merckx, Half Man, Half Bike.
3 It has been broken since by other, lower-profile riders since.
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@VeloVita
Ohigotcha. I feel the same way. I think a lot of our efforts are the same. I think there's also a slight shift in what it means to fall behind in the Record. Because its 60 minutes, there is this sense of a schedule the riders set out and try to keep to (every rider who has attempted the Hour that I've read about uses one) and there is a sense that you can't ever make up for lost ground like you can on a climb. The first two questions Boardman asks are, in the context of the Hour, brutal as well becuase there isn't anything you can do about either of them; if you're not going hard enough, you can't make up for the lost time. If you're going too hard, you'll blow.
Having never done one, it seems beyond torturous.
Merckx said "very" three times for Merckx's Sake!
@snoov
Funny you say that; I try to keep the "volume" short so people don't fall asleep while reading it. This is as short as I could make it. One of my favorite subjects. Sorry.
But ... the l'Heure = the the hour. I make that mistake too, the main hill in my home town is known as "The Law" meaning "The Hill" but I can't stop calling it The Law Hill or The Hill Hill.
How steep is Alpenrose? When the Vandedrome was set up in NJ, I got to race on that. I believe it was 53 degrees and 170 meters around. It felt like riding in a goldfish bowl, you were just about constantly in a turn. And the ends were so steep that if you weren't in the stayers lane going into the turn you were actually going uphill and had to accelerate to get into the turn. Wild, fun stuff.
The point about the will and the other one about the UCI remind me of the extended riff on the hour in the Rider, and the insanity it induces, such as the guy who had a dot of light projected in front of him as a pacing mechanism in an effort to take his own will out of the equation, and the time Oskar Egg measured the track on his hands and knees to prove that a competing rider for the record didn't ride as far as claimed.
@frank
Maybe I got the terminology wrong again, I find your articles to be a good digestible length, for me they could be a bit longer. It's the number of new articles you come up with, and the other contributors and posters keep me coming back every day, thank you all.
@frank
It really is an interesting challenge: in racing whether its a time trial or road race you only have to dose your effort to be faster than the second fastest guy. If you don't go all out and still win, it doesn't matter because you did enough to win. With the hour the whole point is to see how far you can go in 60 minutes so you never really know if you could have gone just a little bit further - so on the one hand I can see the Prophet's point about never wanting to attempt it again, yet I can also see why Boardman and Obree made multiple attempts. I suppose then, the ultimate showing of Rule V would be to attempt the hour record when you already hold the hour record...
I agree with you VeloVita. Any race is essentially how little effort can you give to accomplish a goal. Beat the second fastest person or in a tour pick up time but in the hour there's no cheating or easing, only destruction.
@VeloVita
Which goes back to the point about the gear; I think in the 90's there was such a movement behind the innovation in the bike itself, that it was really inspiring people to look at the hour and say, "well, I'm no where near as fast Merckx was, but on this bike, I can pretend like I am!" It was very cool.
Now that its back to the standard bike, its about the athlete and purely about the suffering. Which is also cool, but it definitely thins the herd in terms of who is willing to go for it.
And the high profile riders are not doing it, because the risk of failure is so high and how that impacts their reputation can be very detrimental.
@snoov
What a delightfully nice thing to say. Thanks. Wouldn't be much fun if you lot weren't coming back all the time, so thanks to you as well - all of you. None of this works without the community